If you are an avid viewer of Ghost Adventures and Most Haunted then it would be fair to assume that paranormal investigating is full of frights and jumps every night. If you also watch these shows you would also think that we get scratched and catch full body apparitions on camera on a regular basis. However, you would be wrong. These shows are created for entertainment purposes and to give the viewer a cheap scare. Not saying I don’t, love these shows, cause I do, but I am now fully aware that a lot of hours of filming go into one 45 minute long show.

When I first started doing investigations I was pretty scared, I’m not gonna lie. I expected spirits to whisper in my ear, to be pushed, scratched and intimidated. Maybe I haven’t been to the right places yet, but so far I haven’t experienced this. What I have experienced can’t be explained. What I have experienced is so subtle that a camera crew would not be able to capture it. Spirit does not have to be aggressive and obvious to be noticed. When you walk into a building and you suddenly cannot breath as the air and atmosphere is thick, how would a TV show convey this? When your heart starts pounding because you feel yourself being stared down by someone or something you cannot see, how would a TV show convey this? The majority of interaction with spirits can not be seen, only felt.

One thing we always mention to our guests at the beginning of investigations is that sometimes we might not get any communication at all. That is OK. Spirits are not performing monkeys, hanging out in buildings waiting for our beck and call. One thing that genuine paranormal groups will never do is fake evidence. We would rather the guests go away and think the night was ‘boring’ that make accusations that a group is faking activity. Paranormal groups strive off of their reputations and a cheap thrill will never come before integrity. So if your night with a local paranormal group DIDN’T seem like an episode of Most Haunted then I would say stick with that group, as sooner or later you never know what you might encounter, at least you know it wasn’t faked.

The paranormal industry is becoming saturated with people trying to get their five minutes of fame by releasing a video full of cheap jumps and obvious scare tactics that genuine videos of subtle paranormal evidence are getting overlooked. I have realised that something doesn’t have to jump out at you to show you it is there, if a spirit can communicate through a flickering light or by changing the atmosphere in the room then I am satisfied with the investigation.

Reincarnation is the belief that after we die our soul can begin a new life in a new body. Like a fresh start, metaphorically wiping the slate clean and starting all over again without any knowledge of our previous existence. Children have been recalling details from ‘past lives’ for thousands of years but in the western world the belief in reincarnation is wholly dismissed. In Asia however, where the idea of being born again is strongly adhered, there have been a large number of reincarnation cases involving children and the evidence to back up these claims is startling.

Ian Stevenson, MD, spent over 40 years researching the ideology around reincarnation up until his death in 2007. He mainly focuses on children as he believed they had less reason to make stuff up, and specifically children from Asia as children from the western world, due to rejecting the idea of reincarnation, were often stifled by their parents beliefs.

Out the 2500 children he studied almost half of the cases were objectively validated and supported the idea of reincarnation. He found a pattern among the children that could help identify future cases of past life experiences and could help differentiate between an over active imagination and a genuine case of reincarnation.

1) As soon as the child can communicate they reject their family and name.

Children will often be heard saying that their family is not their real family and that their real family live in a different location, often mentioning a town or place that the child has never been to. The child will also be able to confidently recount the names of their past life family and describe the house he or she grew up in. Often these details are the ones that are used to validate the claims of reincarnation.

2) Recalling traumatic deaths.

Ian found that in over 50% of cases the children could recall a traumatic or premature death from their previous life and if there was a specific would through either a gun or knife wound, there was usually a scar or birthmark that coincided with these claims.

3) Child knows names of people they have never met.

In cases where they child is able to meet their past life family the child is able to identify the names of everybody as well as revealing secrets and information that only the family would have known. As a result the family from the past life often accept the claims that the child is in fact their deceased relative. A long lasting bond is usually established between the child and family.

4) Gender usually stays the same.

In 90% of cases the child remains the same sex that they occupied in the previous lifetime. Personality traits and preferences are also mostly the same from one incarnation to another.

5) Physical appearance can remain similar.

Ian Stevenson studied Suzanne Ghanem in the late 1960’s, when she was a small child. At 16 months of age, Suzanne pulled the phone off the hook as if she was trying to talk into it and said, over and over, “Hello, Leila?” The family didn’t know who Leila was. When she got older, Suzanne explained that Leila was one of her children and that she was not Suzanne, but Hanan. A photograph of Hanan was available, but it wasn’t until Stevenson revisited Suzanne 1998 that he found that Suzanne, now a grown woman, had the same facial features as her past incarnation.

Hanan and Suzanne look very similar.

Below is a documentary about a young boy called Cameron who believes he grew up and died in Barra, 200 miles from where he currently lives in Glasgow. Watch the documentary and make up your own conclusion. Just an active imagination? Or something much more incredible?

Dolls can be creepy for a number of reasons, the lifeless eyes, the knowing smile, or the outstretched limbs that seem to be calling out to you. But nothing is creepier than the Island of the Dolls in Isla de las Munecas – 17 miles south of Mexico City, Mexico.

A little girl died in the canals nearby, so to honour her memory, people started to leave dolls for the spirit of the girl. Over time hundreds of dolls, some severed and tied from that neck, have been placed around the island.

The island is in fact a floating garden, known as a chinampa, which belonged to a man named Julian Santana Barrera, a hermit who lived isolated on the canal.

The creepy creation was discovered in the 1990s when the local council started clearing up the canal, since then the garden has been a popular tourist spot for people seeking the strange and unusual.

Mr Santana Barrera created the terrifying island in dedication of a little girl whose dead body he found floating in the canal near his home.

A few days later he discovered a small doll found in the same spot where the girl’s body was found, the believed her spirit was inside the doll. He hung the doll to the tree in her honour.

Over time he would collect dolls from rubbish tips and severed limbs from scrap piles to add to the shrine of the little girl. When locals found out about this island, Mr Santana Barrera became a bit of a celebrity and people would bring him dolls to add to the collection.

Bizarrely, in 2001 he was found dead in the canal, from drowning, in the exact spot where the little girl’s body had been found.

It would be interesting to see if such a small island, with such unusual objects and circumstances, would be haunted. I would personally love to visit Mexico and visit the Island. Maybe one day i could add a doll to the collection.

If anyone knows of any paranormal activity or investigations that have taken place here, please let me know!!

*Edit – It is, in fact, a fictitious story told by Don Harper Mills, then president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, in a speech at a banquet in 1987. After it began to circulate on the Internet as a factual story and attained the status of urban legend, Mills stated that he made it up as an illustrative anecdote “to show how different legal consequences can follow each twist in a homicide inquiry” *

There are rumours that this game is an old pagan ritual used to scare people into obeying the gods. There are also rumours that you could potentially die, so i am in no way telling you to play this game. But if you want to…..then read on.

Play at your own risk.

1. It must be exactly 12:00 AM when you begin the ritual, or else it will not work. You will need;Candles
Paper and Pencils
A wooden front door
Salt
A pin needle
All the lights in the house off

Step 1: Everyone who is playing the midnight game must write their names on a piece of paper, then use a pin needle to drop a single drop of their blood onto the paper

Step 2: Place the paper in front of your front door. Your front door must be made of wood.

Step 3: Light a candle

Step 4: Knock on your front door exactly 22 times. (Note: The 22nd knock must happen at 12:00 AM or the ritual will not work.)

Step 5: Open your door, blow out the candle, and close it. You have now summoned the “Midnight Man”. Immediately relight your candle

Step 6: Your goal for the rest of the game is to survive the Midnight Man. Everyone who plays must walk with their candle lit around the house, avoiding the Midnight Man at all costs until the clock strikes 3:33 AM. At which time the Midnight Man will leave. If your candle blows out on its own, it means the midnight man is near, and you have 10 seconds to relight your candle. if you fail to relight the candle in 10 seconds you must surround yourself with a circle of salt and wait until 3:33 AM. If you fail to surround yourself with salt in time the Midnight Man will attack and you will have hallucinations of your worst fears until 3:33 AM.

Signs that the Midnight Man is nearby:
* Your candle blows out
* You suddenly get very cold
* You hear a low whisper
* You see a black humanoid figure within the darkness

WARNING:
* DO NOT USE SOMEONE ELSE’S BLOOD ON YOUR PAPER
* DO NOT STAND IN ONE SPOT UNTIL 3:33 AM, THE MIDNIGHT MAN WILL FIND YOU
* DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FALL ASLEEP DURING THE MIDNIGHT GAME
* DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE HOUSE DURING THE MIDNIGHT GAME
* DO NOT USE A LIGHTER OR ANY OTHER LIGHT SOURCE IN PLACE OF A CANDLE
* DO NOT TRY TO TURN ON THE LIGHTS DURING THE MIDNIGHT GAME

The problem with 99% of paranormal stories and urban legends you read about is that they can all be debunked or are called out for being a hoax. So, it is so exciting to finally get a story, which to this day, has everyone wondering ‘What the hell happened?.’

This is the story of Don Decker aka Rain Boy. It all began in February of 1983. Don, 21 years old from Pennsylvania, was serving a short 4 – 12 month prison sentence for receiving stolen goods, he was granted a furlong to attend the funeral of his Grandfather James Kishaugh. However, what no one knew was that Don has been abused by his grandfather as a child and lived with this burden his entire life.

Don hoped he could move on, “No other part of the family knew anything about what happened, and it was like good fighting evil. The evil was gone and I was hoping, you know, that everything would change.”

After the funeral, Don decided to spend the night with his friends, Bob and Jeannie Keiffer. That is when the unexplained began to happen. While at the Keiffer’s home he started to feel a bit uneasy and he started to get a deep chill. Suddenly, all around him, water began to drip from the living room walls while the Keiffers noticed Don fall into a strange, trance-like state. The Keiffers notified the landlord, Ron Van Why. When Ron and his wife arrived, he was just as puzzled by the problem as the Keiffers.

“We’d decided maybe it was the plumbing, but there were no pipes in the front end of the house to leak. There was basically nothing there that the water could have come from.” After watching it for a while, I discovered that it wasn’t only coming from the ceiling down. It could come from the wall over or from the floor up. There was no basic direction that it was coming from. It could come from anywhere.”

They then decided it was time to phone the police. Patrolman Richard Wolbert arrived at the scene and couldn’t explain what what happening.

Officer Wolbert recalled the moment he met Don. ‘Trust me, trust me, just walk into the house,’ Don said. I walked in the door and he came right in behind me. And I couldn’t get two steps inside the door and I was absolutely pelted.

Not only was it raining inside, the water drops also defied physics.

“We were standing just inside the front door and met this droplet of water traveling horizontally. It passed between us and just traveled out into the next room.”

Another Officer John Baujan arrived at the scene and was terrified that he was witnessing things, that in reality, he shouldn’t be witnessing. The police decided to make some reports about the incident and the Keiffers and Don decided to grab some food at the diner that is across the street from them. Ron and his wife decided to stay at the house, but as the other three left for the diner, the rain immediately stopped.

That is when things got even more weird.

The owner of the restaurant, Pam Scrofano, noticed something strange about Don as he sat down to eat with the Keiffers; she thought he was possessed.

“You looked at Donny and he was like in a trance. He would look at you, but not knowing you were there. I said to Jeannie, ‘He’s got to be possessed.’ We’re sitting there. Couple of seconds later, there’s water all over the pizzeria, too. I’ve never seen anything like that happen. I went in the cash register, I had a crucifix there, I took it out, put it on him. And the minute I put it on him and it touched his skin, he got burned. There’s no way that anybody could have played a joke like that. This was real. Donny was doing it himself. He was doing it without realizing he was doing it.”

Don now realised that everything that had happened in the house, and now in the restaurant, was because of him. But WHY was this happening? No one knew.

Back at the Keiffer’s house the landlords wife confronted Don and blamed him for everything that was going on. At that moment, everything in the house started rattling, pots and pans in the kitchen were banging together, like an earthquake, except there was no earthquake.

Don suddenly levitated off the ground. He was just floating. Everyone was terrified and no one could explain a thing. Don recalls that frightening moment. ”

I was just like floating. Then it was like a push. It wasn’t like somebody taking their hand and pushing me. It was like feeling it all over your body at once. I’m a big guy, you know, I’ve always been assertive, and that made me felt like a newborn. You know, I’m scared right now just talking about it, really.”

A few hours later the two officers arrived back at the house with their Chief. Officer Baujan explains what happened.

“When the chief got to the house, he was pelted with water just as Rich and I were. I got the impression that he was put on the spot, maybe a little bit embarrassed, like we expected something out of him that he could answer. There was no way to explain what happened. I think he was put in a position where he might have felt a little uncomfortable.”

The Chief just told the officers it was nothing more than a leaky pipe and no report was ever created about the incident. The Chief told them to not talk about it ever again, Officer Baujan was told to forget about what he had saw, but this was impossible.

The next day, three officers ignored the orders of the police chief. They went to the Keiffer home to continue their investigation. One of the officers was Bill Davies:

“We’re standing there and I gave Mr. Decker this gold cross to hold. Next thing he says, ‘It’s burning my hands.’ And there’s no explanation for it. When you picked it up, when you grabbed it, it’s not hot-hot, but it’s hot and I held onto it.”

Don also once again levitated off the floor. Lt. John Rundle said he witnessed it:

“All of a sudden, he lifted up off the ground and he flew across the room with the force as though a bus had hit him. There were three claw marks on the side of his neck, which drew blood. I have no answer for it whatsoever. And, I just draw a blank, even today.”

Officer Bill Davies was also at a loss:

“I’ve been a cop 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like this, never. There’s always an explanation when something happens. If you gotta investigate, you come up with something. This is why it happened. For this case, there is no explanation.”

Finally, on the third night, Ron Van Why asked a preacher to come to the house and try an exorcism. Every Protestant minister and Catholic priest in Stroudsburg had turned Ron down. Ron explained what he saw:

“As she started to pray, Donny went into a convulsion. He started to shake. He pulled himself up into like a ball and the longer she prayed, he started to relax, then. By the time she got done praying, the water was gone. And that was the last that we saw any water at the house at all.”

The mysterious rain was gone and Don Decker appeared to return to his old self. But the change was only temporary. After his furlough, Don returned to jail. Within a few days, the mysterious rain returned, this time, in the jail.

“They put me in a maximum security cell. I was in there with another inmate. And I was thinking I should make it rain in here. And all of a sudden, water started coming out of the concrete floor, and at that point, I thought, ‘I can do stuff.’”

According to Don, he now realized he could control the rain, at will. A sceptical guard challenged him to make it rain in Warden Dave Keenhold’s office. Warden Keenhold recalled:

“I was sitting at the desk, writing a report. I was all by myself in the administration area. Nobody else was around. It was approximately 8:00 in the evening. At the time, I didn’t feel anything, but my shirt was drooping down.”

An officer entered and told Warden Keenhold to look at his shirt:

“And right about the center of my sternum, about four inches long, two inches wide, I was just saturated with water. I was startled. I was scared. The officer was frightened at that particular time, and I just didn’t have an explanation why it happened.”

The Warden called in the Rev. William Blackburn:

“All of a sudden, I received this frantic call from a sergeant in the jail. And he said, ‘Can you come over? We need you. We need your help.’ So he brought this very meek and mild-mannered young man into the room. And he was asking for my help.”

Don told the Reverend that he could make it rain and that crosses placed on his body burned. According to the Reverend Blackburn, he told Don to admit that he was just making things up, then:

“All of a sudden his demeanor changed and this smell came into the room. Nurses and doctors, medical people, say when you walk into a room where someone is dying with a cancer or something, usually there’s a smell. You can tell when you walk in the room. I smelled a smell like that multiplied five times at least. Evil, foreboding. He raised his hand and rubbed his fingers together. And all of a sudden, it started to rain. It was like the devil’s rain. It was a mist. I was in the presence of evil. I opened up the Bible and started to read to him. But the pages never got wet. So help me, it was a frightening thing. I think I was praying more for me than him. I prayed, and it was only a brief period, and the rain stopped.”

Rev. Blackburn said he noticed a sudden change in Don as well:

“He subsided and you could feel a peace. He said thank you. He got tears in his eyes. We hugged and prayed together. He was possessed. There was no doubt in my mind. There’s no way a human could do what he did in that room. There’s no way that he did anything, but what he did was spiritual, and it wasn’t of God. Guaranteed, it was not of God.”

Don Decker said that he feels like the bizarre occurrences won’t happen again:

“Well it’s over. It hasn’t happened again. Basically, I’m just hoping that it never will, and I just, you know, go day by day. And as for my grandfather, I think what had happened was his doing. Because he abused me when I was young, he got a chance to abuse me again.”

Chip Decker, no relation to Don, and Peter Jordan are the main paranormal researchers on this case. Chip was impressed with the eye-witness accounts:

“I think what makes this case very unique is that all of the witnesses are so credible. We’re dealing with very good, well-seasoned police officers that were obviously rather frightened and shaken by this, but also had the powers of observation.”

Peter Jordan:

“The Donald Decker case is by far the singularly most fascinating and important case I have ever personally been involved in. That does not mean I believe that it necessarily is proof positive to me of demonic infestation. But it is the case, in my own personal experience up to this point, that comes the closest to that hypothesis.”

In all, nine eyewitnesses, plus Don himself, were willing to go on record saying they saw, heard, and felt phenomena apparently not of this world. And they continue to believe Don was possessed by the devil. They have found no other explanation for the bizarre events.

So today is the dreaded Friday the 13th. Will you get some bad news? Fall down the stairs? Have a rubbish day in work? How did the Friday the 13th Superstition start?

We are all aware of the classic horror films Friday the 13th staring the masked killer Jason Voorhees, but what legend was these films based on? Well, there is no written evidence for anything Friday the 13th related before the 19th century. The earlier reference ever made to this date was in Gioachino Rossini’s Biography, written by Henry Sutherland Edward in 1869.

He [Rossini] was surrounded to the last by admiring friends; and if it be true that, like so many Italians, he regarded Fridays as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that one Friday 13th of November he died.

So is it just that 13 is an unlucky number and Friday is an unlucky day that has created this superstition. Personally Fridays are my favorite day and i would have to rename Monday as the most Unlucky day. Friday, however, was the day that Jesus was crucified, so to many people that follow religion this could also be a reason behind the day being unpopular. The most interesting thing is the numerology, and WHY 13 is deemed unlucky. The number twelve is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in the twelve months of the year, twelve hours of the clock, twelve gods of Olympus, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Apostles of Jesus, the 12 successors of Muhammad in Shia Islam, twelve signs of the Zodiac, etc., whereas the number thirteen was considered irregular, transgressing this completeness. There is also a superstition, thought by some to derive from the Last Supper or a Norse myth, that having thirteen people seated at a table results in the death of one of the diners.

The fear of Friday the 13th has been called friggatriskaidekaphobia (Frigga being the name of the Norse goddess for whom “Friday” is named in English and triskaidekaphobia meaning fear of the number thirteen).

In other cultures, the Spanish deem Tuesday the 13th as a bad luck day and the Italian fear Friday the 17th as the unluckiest day.

One notable celebrity which unfortunately died on a Friday the 13th was Tupac Shakur in 1996.